QRadio: A Music Sharing Platform In Public Space

Finding hidden treasures in the most random places around the city is one of my favourite urban tasks! Repudo is a smartphone app that allows you to leave or pick up ‘treasures’ such as text messages, pictures, videos and generally any digital object around the city. Berlin-based street artist Sweza took this concept a bit further with his street intervention project called QRadio.

As the project’s name indicates, QRadio is an installation consisting of a real-scale boombox poster that has a QR code in the place where a cassette should be. By placing your smartphone in front of the code, your phone scans the QR code and ‘transforms’ into a cassette (I luv cassettes!). This virtual cassette tape plays the tune uploaded by Sweza. Thus, you can actually make the Boombox work!

The urban intervention itself is a quite interesting one, giving street art and street music a new mode of expression, apart from its aesthetical aspect. However, the application of such a concept as a marketing and promotion tool for the music industry could actually be brilliant! Big bands have already realized the need for alternative methods and tools of promoting their work. Imagine yourself walking around the city and being offered the opportunity to find new music treasures just by scanning a QR code! Music-treasure hunt? Count me in!

In the district of Lombok in the city of Utrecht, The Netherlands, the first pop-up lounge has been placed. Pop-Up, a piece of furniture for public space, is a design of Carmela Bogman and Rogier Martens.

From June 11-14 a new festival is taking over the rooftops of Rotterdam. Rotterdam Rooftop Days offers a new perspective of the city and a chance to explore previously unused spaces in creative and entertaining ways.